Mormons, of course, are known for their habit of posthumously converting dead souls. They also believe that families are reunited in eternity after death. So the incentive for Ann Romney to convert Edward Davies in death so that they may one day frolic together in the interplanetary afterlife was presumably fairly powerful. Did she posthumously baptize him, despite his belief while he lived that such a baptism and the beliefs that undergird it are pure “hogwash”? I have asked both the Romney camp and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints in the past; both declined to say.
Stories like this remind me of stories like this, and as always, I am strangely amused and cheered by further evidence that our species is congenitally insane.
Anyway, my grandfather had an interest in genealogy, and he told me that while our Amish ancestors stayed in Pennsylvania, another branch of the family tree extended west and became Mormons. Perhaps someone out in Utah is keeping tabs on me and the rest of the clan for just such a purpose, but if so, I’m afraid it’s too late. I was actually baptized Methodist, but I read in a collection of folktales about witchcraft about a girl who cheerfully confessed to the charges against her, claiming that she renounced her baptism by putting one hand on her crown, the other on the soles of her feet, and giving everything in between her two hands to the Devil. So that’s what I did as well. Good luck haggling over my soul with him.